A Chorus of Ten Thousand
The night after the Battle of Shiloh, when there were thousands of wounded on the field, one Christian soldier as he lay there dying under the starlight began to sing, “There is a land of pure delight.” When he reached the next line there were scores of voices singing, “Where saints immortal reign.” The song was caught up all through the fields among the wounded until it was said there were at least ten thousand wounded men uniting in the triumphant closing verse of that beautiful hymn:
“Could we but climb where Moses stood,
And view the landscape o’er,
Not Jordan’s stream, nor death’s cold flood,
Should fright us from the shore.”
Mrs. Margaret Bottome relates an incident about
Marching to Music
“I had a brother who was in the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War. He told me of a day in that dreadful wilderness when the Connecticut regiment was traveling through such deep mud that they could hardly pull their boots out of it as they took one step after another. They were thoroughly dispirited and they had no music—the band was far in the rear, but all at once they heard the sound that told them the band was coming, and as it drew nearer they caught the strain. The band was playing a tune known to every Methodist:
‘Come on, my partners in distress,